Holiday Shoppers Leave CRM Data in Their Wake

Computerworld - Christmas may be over, but retailers have been busy making their lists this holiday season and will now begin the work of checking them twice.
Bill Franks, senior vice president and associate CIO at New York-based Saks Inc., bought 2.6TB of additional storage last year to help capture as much information as possible about the company's customers.
"As we get more sophisticated and as the market gets more complex, you need to know where you have room to move," Franks said.
He said Saks originally had a "satisfactory" 1.9TB of storage, "but we weren't where I'd like to be."
Once shopping subsides after the holidays, Franks and his team will begin to mine the data, identifying customer buying patterns and store trends.
"We really believe knowing more than your competition is going to be a strategic advantage as we move forward," Franks said.
William Hurley, a program manager at Boston consulting firm The Yankee Group, said brick-and-mortar retailers have begun to learn about the importance of data from their online brethren.
"The dot-coms showed you can track behavior and interest and have all this rich data at your disposal," Hurley said. "That it's moving to the brick-and-mortar world now is no surprise."
He said that Saks' increased storage "reflects the immensity of data they can collect" and that retailers will likely see exponential growth in their storage needs each year.
"Some e-tailers are finding 100% growth quarterly, which gives you an idea of how much data we're talking about here," Hurley said.
Storage Boom
John Madden, a storage analyst at Summit Strategies Inc. in Boston, said many retail IT managers are seeking beefed-up storage to merge the information of their online and brick-and-mortar businesses.
"They're still trying to figure out how to connect that synergy," he said.
Madden said he also sees storage as a winning pitch for IT managers.
"The possibility of greater customer retention is an easier sell on ROI than new switches for the network," he said. "You can show where it will have a definite impact on the bottom line."
Hurley said greater chunks of stored information and better data-mining software have "a chicken-and-egg effect," always driving companies to get more of both.
Bob Sampson, vice president of sales and strategy for storage systems at IBM, said customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software had proved to be a particular boon to storage vendors seeking clients in the retail market.
"We've identified retail as our second-largest area of opportunity, behind banking and finance," Sampson said.
For Franks, the expansion means more than increased storage; he is eyeing building a completely Web-enabled storage-area network.
"We're looking to use this data to keep our shelves stocked, to run promotions and to forecast for next year's high season," he said. "This is our crystal ball."

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